Powerful woman: I see you

To the woman who: Is sick of standing behind her man. I see you. Keeps quiet in meetings. I see you. Stays for the kids. I see you. Thinks she can’t. I see you.
Wants to be bold and own the stage and shrinks as soon as she sees the audience. I see you. To the woman who wants it to be different, who wants more peace and freedom: I see you. The program isn’t yours to live. Untie the shackles of nice, good, silent and small.

Stop promoting yourself

I’m running a workshop for a room full of women who’ve been told and sold they need to get better at promoting themselves and having a more powerful presence if they want to climb that corporate ladder and have more “success”. I get to the part about promoting themselves and the women say this: I feel so uncomfortable promoting myself / I don’t want to appear up myself / I can’t stand the way I see the men in my office do it / What will people think of me going on about how great I am? / Who am I to stand up and say such things? / Can we just skip this part? These comments are coming from the mouths of Programmed Women. They are not coming from these women’s true voices. It’s like a case of very bad lip-synching on a cheap music video.

Let’s dump the notion of nice, easy, difficult and high maintenance

As I continue to navigate the complexities of a new living arrangement, between three people with three different surnames, and behaviour that matches those complexities and certainly isn’t nice, and is pushing my buttons big time and sometimes leaves me in tears when she’s not around, I hear myself say words like this: She’s high maintenance. She’s difficult. She needs to learn to manage her emotions. I started to wonder if those words were even mine. As in, deep down truly my words. They felt heavy and cringe-worthy in a I-can’t-believe-I-just-said-that kind of way. I wondered whether I’d swallowed those cutting words long before I can remember and they seemingly became mine after years of conditioning about how women should behave to make everyone else’s life easier.